Hot Topics:

Climate roundtable reviews impacts already seen in York County, state

Scientists in York County discussed how natural systems are being affected by recent habitat changes.

By STEPHANIE REIGHART Daily Record/Sunday News

Updated:
04/02/2013 12:52:31 AM EDT

York, PA -

Do you remember getting more daytime mosquito bites last summer than 10 years ago?

How many Great Egrets did you see nesting at Kiwanis Lake in York last year?

Do you like having a cup of coffee to start your day? What if you couldn't get any, or the price rose?

Changes like these were brought up Wednesday at a roundtable discussion on climate change.

Ed Perry, the Pennsylvania outreach coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation, led a crowd of around 30 people in the discussion at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of York.

Perry, along with three other speakers, discussed examples of habitats in York County, Pennsylvania and other connected ecosystems that are currently showing evidence of climate change.

Keith Peterman, a professor of chemistry at York College, takes a group of students down to Costa Rica each spring. While he has noticed many subtle changes to the wildlife over his years of study in the tropical climate, this year, something stood out.

Peterman and his students were driving past a field filled with lush, green coffee plants covered in white blooms. The sight was strange, Peterman said, because it was the wrong season for the plants to be in bloom.

After asking around, Peterman was told that the coffee plants were no longer keeping to their usual life cycle and were blooming and developing beans at shorter intervals.

Advertisement

While this might sound like a boon to the coffee industry -- shorter life cycles means more growth in a given year -- it was actually weakening the plants and making them less productive, Peterman said.

The changes are leading to a more volatile coffee market and harming farmers' livelihoods, he said.

Tom Smith is the West Nile virus program administrator at Penn State Extension in York County. Each year, his team spends months collecting samples of mosquito eggs and adults around the area.

In 2012, York County was No. 1 in the state for the number of adult mosquitoes that tested positive for West Nile and No. 3 in the country, Smith said.

The warmer weather patterns recorded in the last decade are allowing crop pests that usually can't survive Pennsylvania winters to move north and impact local agriculture, Smith said.

"To protect human health, the only solution to these pests is more pesticides on our crops," Smith said.

Paul Zeph, the director of conservation at Audubon Pennsylvania, said the National Audubon Society has collected data showing around 60 percent of all birds species in North America are wintering in different locations than before.

These habitat changes are impacting what the birds eat, what species they compete with for resources and their reproduction, Zeph said.

Each bird species has a certain timing for when it migrates, nests and hatches. These times have evolved to match when the bird's food source peaks or falls, he said.

"If a species hatches when its food source is not at peak, the baby birds will not get enough to eat," Zeph said.

Mismatches in timing are already being seen and are negatively affecting bird populations.